Senses: A blog about the Thirdi Software perception » iPhone

Google, what have you done to my phone?

Wes — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:01:15 +0000

It seems that Apple has quietly retreated from the open source battlefield as Google Android and other platforms have embraced the chaos. This has perplexed some analysts, who have referred to the iPhone as an “open source wasteland“. While many have approached this from a mechanical point of view, focusing on software and hardware particulars or questioning the role of iPhone’s proprietary platform as a deterrent, I think it comes down to an issue of management philosophy or company culture. Google is a very fluid and unconventional company in many ways. They have often shot first and asked questions later in regards to projects that have become stellar successes despite difficulties in foreseeing profitability i.e. they take risks. And with open source there are risks. And in open source things can be fluid and unconventional.

Sure the iPhone is a proprietary platform but so is Windows, and some of the best loved applications or programs on Windows (such as Firefox) are open source. So I discount that theory. Not being involved in exploring open source does not translate to not taking a risk, but apple currently has no need to embrace open source as the gazillion apps available on their store seem to be selling just fine. In fact, though I love open source and do firmly believe that it will unlock all sorts of potential for programming in the future, that being said it can also be a pain in the ass. Models running Google Android platform have come under as the company has released its new Android OS with little to no heads up for customers. This has caused some headaches for developers suddenly faced with new obstacles or challenges. So in one respect the stability and dependability of iPhone still makes it a very attractive platform to develop for. That being said, all it would take is for Google to be a little more proactive about giving developers a heads up regarding changes to Android phones and much of this could be remedied. One other possibility is that the new Google Nexus 1 will have automatic software updates to fix problems and inform developers that are programming in such a fluid environment. The US carriers and telecom manufacturers have already been tripping over each other to carry Google Android phones- why not develop a Google phone that bypasses Motorolla et all? Google reminds me of the Blob, remember that movie? But I still find myself really liking the company. It’s like a good Blob with people screaming and running towards it instead of away from it.

So maybe Apple is avoiding open source like it’s the Blob? Or the Son of Blob? So what does that make Apple? Maybe because it’s more focused on proprietary software platforms we can compare it to Mechagodzilla…

So as far as company cultures are concerned Google is like the Blob and Apple is like Mechagodzilla. Tune in next week when I decide which sandwiches best represent the management styles of Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

How to Scare the Crap Out of Your Kids at Christmas

Peter — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:07:58 +0000

*****WARNING! Spoilers about the existence of Santa Claus ahead****

When I was a kid, and believed in Santa Claus, I always got predictably excited about Christmas. Yes, people told me that if I was naughty all year (and I was always naughty) I wouldn’t get that Big Wheel I wanted, but would instead receive nothing but a lump of coal and maybe some tube socks… But I didn’t actually believe it. I blithely assumed that, based on past years’ experience, I would actually get an awesome present or two, no matter how many bad grades, muddy clothes and stray animals I naughtily brought home in the months preceding Christmas.

But many of the kids of today may not share that same peace of mind as they bed down on Christmas Eve. They might actually be afraid of that whole Santa’s blacklist thing.

Or at least they will if their parents sign up for the “Parents Calling Santa” iPhone app. With this application, a parent can sign up to have Mr. Claus himself call up their kids. And, if that parent chooses, Santa can scare the living bejebus out of the kid by telling him or her that he was way too naughty this year, and won’t be getting any presents. Now, maybe I was a bit more naive than the kids of today, but if my eight year-old self had received a threatening phone-call from Angry ol’ St. Nick on the night before Christmas, I would have cried, crapped my pants or hid in my closet for a few days…or possibly all three simultaneously.

If that’s not scary enough, parents can also use send their kids a custom video of Santa talking to their kid. Like the iPhone app, this website also offers special customization options for kids who have been naughty. Parents can have Santa mention the present they would have gotten, if they hadn’t been so bad. A multiple choice drop-down provides a list of possible naughty transgressions that have offended Santa, including everything from spending too much time on Facebook, to talking with his/her mouth full.

There’s not much time left before Christmas morning, so if there are any parents out there with kids to scare, you better hurry. Though if your family is anything like mine, you don’t need clever websites or iPhone apps to scare the wee ones – Uncle Lou, a santa suit and 15 rum n’ nogs should more than do the trick.

Bi-curious Products Blend Off and Online Worlds

Peter — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:33:35 +0000

The world used to be simpler. There was the brick n’ mortar world, and there was the internet-y world. But with the passage of time, everything’s getting all mixed up. Here are three products and services that in some way blend the two worlds in ways that both useful, and confusing for someone of advancing years, such as myself or your Dad. And yes, they’re all available for purchase in time for the upcoming holiday season.

TweetBookz – Tweets, by design, are meant to be ephemeral and short-lived. You see a funny picture, think up a witty pun, or have an interesting bowel movement, and you tap out a quick 140 character post about it. It gets sent out to your friends and associates and is quickly read and forgotten. Or so we all thought. But TweetBookz take this uniquely online world and give it a permanent, paper-y presence on your coffee table. Or, more likely, in a dusty box in your attic. The idea is simple: you pick 200 of your very best tweets and this company turns them into a book, with one tweet per page. For the sake of veracity, you’re not allowed to go in and edit your tweets after the fact to make them more awesome. And you’re also not allowed to borrow any from some funnier, smarter or sexier Twitter user. It’s gotta be all you. So if I were to create a TweetBook myself, it would consist of 200 identical pages, each saying: “Got up, did some writing, watched reruns of The Office. Tty tomorrow!” They cost around $25.50 for the hard-cover edition. And you have to go hard-cover, because this will be something you’ll want to read and re-read for decades to come.

Amazon’s Instant Video Streaming with DVD Purchase – What’s the crappiest part of buying a DVD from an online retailer, instead of down at Best Buy? That’s right, it’s the infernal waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Well, the wait is over. Now when you purchase certain hard-copy DVDs from Amazon, you get instant access to a streaming version of the movie. It’s only available to US purchasers at the moment, and only for about 300 TV shows and movies. And, for now, it’s only for a limited time. But if it’s popular, you’d have to think they’ll roll this feature out on a much bigger level. The best thing about this is that you can buy DVDs as gifts for people, and still get to watch it yourself via the streaming version.

VeriFone’s iPhone Credit Card Payment System – So you’re selling some vintage Scobby Doo collectibles to a guy who saw your Craigslist ad. You meet him (somewhere public and well-lit, I hope) and he doesn’t have any cash. No problem. Just swipe his credit card through this little iPhone gizmo, and his money will instantly be yours to enjoy. It brings the joy and convience of ecommerce to the brick and mortar world of, well, wherever you happen to be. To operate this, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so it’s really only meant for relatively high-volume sellers, like delivery pizza parlors, door-to-door salespersons and prostitutes. But if there’s anyone like that on your holiday shopping list, you know what to buy them.

New “Google Goggles” Allows Search by Sight

Peter — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:08:24 +0000

Personally, I was pretty impressed the other day when someone showed me search via voice-recognition on their iPhone. I was already feeling bad about not being up on the latest breakthrough in search technology when, to make matters worse, Google announces another whole new way to search.

It’s the new Google Goggles feature, and with it a user can snap a photo, and then run a search using only the visual data in the photo. So if you’re staring at a painting in an art gallery and want to know all about it, just take a picture of it. If it happens to be one of the more than one billion images already in the database, then you’re in luck. Some of the other examples posted on the Google Goggles page are recognizing the label on a wine bottle, a corporate logo, a restaurant, or the cover of a book. Handy stuff for sure, though they don’t really begin to explore the eventual possibilities for a technology like this.

The big one will, one day, be facial recognition. Google already has a database with more than a billion images. What’s a few billion more, say, one for every person on earth? Of course that’s a few years down the road, but the possibilites are staggering. For their part, Google has already addressed the issue, with their vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, saying: “For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition… We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place.”

And there’s the kicker. There are immense privacy issues around having anyone instantly able to access your personal information just by snapping a photo of you. But given that the technology is already so close at hand, it’s only a matter of time before this type of thing becomes a reality.

But back to present-day reality… Right now, Google Goggles is only available on Android phones, and only in a beta version. They have promised, though, that it will soon be available as an iPhone app as well.

iPhone apps for Black Friday-crazed shoppers

Peter — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:05:39 +0000

The day after Thanksgiving, or Black Friday as its commonly known, is one big feeding frenzy for bargain hunters. Like hungry piranhas, they descend on malls around the U.S. on the hunt for the best savings of the year. Unfortunately, there are a lot of piranhas, so competition for the best deals is fierce. And many Black Friday shopping adventures end with more tears and empty shelves, than hundred dollar flat-screen TVs.

But, as one might expect, there’s an app for that. Actually, there’s a couple.

Mall Maps – You Are Here costs a mere $2.99 in the iPhone App Store, and provides shoppers with detailed floor-plans to over 1,000 American malls. It’s the perfect thing to plan the attack route and, perhaps more importantly, an effective exit strategy. Currently it’s the 9th most popular reference app in the store.

TGI Black Friday is a free app put out by the online coupon repository, Dealcatcher.com. As the source would indicate, it offers more than 8,000 discounts at major retailers.

ShopSavvy is another free app, available for both iPhone and Android users. And it scores well both for technical innovation, and retailer angering. Using your camera’s phone, you can go into a store and scan the UPC code of a product. The app will then tell you exactly how much that same item costs at all the competitor’s stores. Great for bargain-hunters, annoying for the folks selling the products.

So if you are the U.S. and you plan to brave the crowds on Black Friday, don’t leave home without spare water, pepper spray for crowd control, and your app-equipped iPhone.

Your iPhone knows if you’re “Fit or Fugly”

Peter — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:23:47 +0000

There’s a new app available for iPhones that may help finally settle one of the grave issues of our time. To function properly, society has to be divided into haves, and have nots. Currently, one of the ways that happens is the stratification between those who own iPhones, and those who don’t. Those who don’t are obviously a mass of unwashed rabble who can be safely ignored. And those who do own one of the sexy little devices are awesome. But there’s a problem with this division – pretty much everyone now owns one. So if everyone is a have, how do we as a society know who to look down on? And how does an individual iPhone owner know whether to be filled with self-confidence, or to hate themselves for being part of the unwashed masses?

Thankfully, a new app has been released that will make it much easier to draw this important distinction. Visit the App Store right now, and for 99 cents, you can download “Fit or Fugly”.

Here’s how it works. You upload a photo of yourself (or a loved or loathed one) and then attach “anchor pins” to all the important facial features: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, dimples, etc. The app then uses the data collected from the anchor pins and measures your features against Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio. If your face is symmetrical, you’re declared Fit. But if your facial symmetry resembles that of Ron Howard’s little brother, you’re branded Fugly. Oh, and it works on pets too!

Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, by the way, isn’t just something the app designers made up. It’s a mathematical formula that some maintain is an accurate means to determine how aesthetically pleasing things are, based on their symmetry.

But can Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, and a 99 cent app, really tell you if you’re Hot or Not Fit or Fugly? I wish I could tell you, but I don’t own an iPhone.

New iPhone app from Pepsi pisses off pretty much everyone

Peter — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:02:23 +0000

I can just imagine how the conversation went down. There was a a bunch of guys (definitely guys) from the marketing team for Pepsi’s energy drink, AMP, all sitting around a meeting room.

“iPhone apps are so hot right now. Let’s do one.”

“Yes! Absolutely! Any ideas?”

“Well, I remember this one app that got tons of media attention. It was called Baby Shaker. And it was a virtual crying baby, and the only way to get it to stop crying was to really give it a good shake. After you did that, the baby died or something.”

“That sounds pretty offensive, but I bet we can top it!”

———–

And while the good folks at AMP may not have got quite the negative publicity as the creators of Baby Shaker, their new Before You Score application definitely wins the prize for Most Bone-Headedly Offensive App Idea by a Major Brand.

The idea is pretty simple. Before You Score breaks down all of womankind into 24 categories, from Cougar, to Bookworm, to Rebound Girl. Then it gives you customized tips on how to sex them up. Those tips include things like pick-up lines, the names of bands they might like, even nearby hotels with an appropriate decor for the particular woman you’re looking to get busy with. You can watch a video of the app in action right here.

Oh, and once you use your iPhone-fueled powers of seduction to get some action, the app also allows you to post to a “Brag List” which gets sent out via Twitter.

Unsurprisingly, reaction to the app was, um, mixed. And it wasn’t just bloggers that were angry (and really, aren’t they always angry?). The public, those folks that Pepsi/AMP was theoretically hoping to reach with the iPhone app campaign, were up in arms about it too. Twitter has been afire for the last two days with people pointing out how mad and offended they are. Predictably, Pepsi has reacted to the whole brouhaha by issuing a public apology (and by self-deprecatingly creating a “pepsifail” hashtag).

Of course, for those who believe that any publicity is good publicity, all this attention might just have been the whole point of launching the app. People haven’t been talking about Pepsi this much since those halcyon days of the Pepsi Challenge.

New iPod Nano has videocamera, pedometer, lightsaber

Peter — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:52:07 +0000

The iPhone gets so much press these days it’s easy to forget about the venerable iPod. Once upon a time it defined a technology, its name becoming synonymous with portable mp3 players. But these days nobody in the media talks about them all that much, except maybe to wonder how much those crazy iPhone sales figures come at the cost of their forgotten little iBrother.

The truth is that, despite their lack of splashy headlines, iPods still sell like crazy. In fact, sales figures for iPods in 2009 are right on pace with last year, despite the rise of the iPhone. And those numbers might just go a little higher with today’s big rollout of the new fifth generation iPod Nano.

It packs a couple nice new features into its skinny little frame – a pedometer, FM radio capability, an integrated microphone for voice recording. But the coolest, though not the most surprising, feature is the built-in videocamera. This isn’t exactly new territory for Apple, but its inclusion in the Nano is interesting.

It puts the iPod Nano in direct conflict with the very successful Flip Video camera. Obviously Apple knows that user-generated video has been a huge thing for quite awhile…and that people have been buying competitor’s products to shoot their own video. Now the addition of a camera to the Nano means a huge new population just got equipped with a device that lets them record, edit (in a rudimentary way) and upload homemade porn video to YouTube quickly and easily.

But what about the picture quality? When I first heard this announcement, I half expected it to be one step up from the Fisher Price Pixelvision kids camcorder. I needn’t have worried. It isn’t fantastic, but the iPod Nano’s video quality is pretty good. And it’s especially impressive when you consider how tiny the device is, and how much of its square-footage is taken up by stuff other than the videocamera.

The question now is whether a million people with a million new videocameras will actually be able to produce anything worth watching. If nothing else, we’ll probably get a few more good Fail videos out of the deal.

Delete Your iTunes Library

Nick — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:07:40 +0000

Having a comprehensive music library is a point of pride for many a geek; however, it takes a staggering amount of time to build and maintain. What if you could run a free client as fast, reliable, and flexible as iTunes that comes preloaded with 6 million tracks? That is the promise of Swedish music startup Spotify – and they might just deliver on it.

Before we get into why Spotify is so great, it should be noted that the service is not officially available in Canada. Spotify managed to convince the four major record labels to license their content with terms that must make other music startups green with envy – but only in Europe. They are working on a Canadian launch soon, although some impatient users have taken matters into their own hands and signed up for accounts through proxies. If you are curious, and don’t have a lot of respect for international music licensing agreements, you can try it yourself; although the ad-free version does require a European credit card. Also, you’re on your own to find a working proxy – the one in the linked article has been banned.

So, what is it like to live without iTunes? Liberating. There is a search box in the top left corner that lets you make playlists on the fly, there is a biography and discography for almost every artist on the site, and there is a Pandora-esque Internet radio station for any artist they have information on. The library extends to 6 million tracks from the major labels, although independents are still unrepresented. In terms of on-the-go playlists, Spotify has iTunes beat hands down. Music always keeps playing, and it is painless to add new songs to the queue and rearrange the play order. Paid accounts stream music in 320kbps Ogg Theora audio, which should satisfy audiophiles. There is even an iPhone app for paying users that can stream any song, and will keep up to 3000 cached for airplane rides and network dead spots.

We are well on our way to having the ‘Great Jukebox In The Sky’. The music library is fated to become a relic of the past, like the phone book or rolodex. Music is going to be on-demand, unlimited, and very very easy to find. Geeks will have to go back to building ridiculous case mods to show off.

Do iPhones have a self-destruct button or what?

Peter — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:02:42 +0000

Imagine this scenario. You’re happily using your Annoy-A-Teen iPhone app (which plays an extremely piercing high-frequency tone that only teenagers can hear) to chase some kids away from your koi pond, when suddenly your iPhone explodes. It’s a disturbing thing to think about. And the idea of it brings up three important questions.

Could it actually happen?

If so, will you be killed?

And, more importantly, will your iPhone be okay?

The answers to these questions seem to be: Maybe if you live in France, no and no effin’ way. A couple weeks ago, the internet buzzed with stories of iPhones “exploding” all across France, from the suburbs of Paris to the Riviera. Since then, various stories have come out about the fact there may be up to 15 similar cases in the US and Britain.

And even more interesting, the allegation is that the reason those 15 or so cases haven’t been widely reported is because Apple has engaged in a cover-up. In the British case, Apple supposedly made the victim sign a confidentiality agreement (gag-order) barring her from speaking out about the defective smart phone, before they would refund her money.

Of course there are a couple other sides to the story. First, are the iPhones really “exploding”? There seem to be two main complaints, batteries that overheat and ignite, and shattered screens. In either case, danger to the life and livelihood of the victims is slight…though at least one person has suffered an eye injury from shards of glass. On the other hand, if your iPhone either ignites or shatters, chances are very good you won’t be using it to send Tweets any time soon.

Another thing to realize is that Apple has sold somewhere in the vicinity of 26 million iPhones. When that many units of any technology go out the door, there are bound to be defects. The biggest reason we’re reading about the fairly small number of iPhone “catastrophic failures” is, ironically, because there are 26 million of ‘em out there. It’s an immensely popular device and so any news about it, good or bad, interests a whole lot of people.